This is why academization is a scandal ....

[Mischance]

Extract from a letter to The Guardian ........

Take my home town of York as an example: where once the 63 state schools were maintained by a director of children’s services on circa £110,000 and an assistant director of education on circa £80,000, we now have six Mats whose focus is increasingly drawn outside the city boundaries. Together they now employ six CEOs on salaries ranging from at least £130,000 to more than £160,000, six CFOs and several executive heads, and sport a combined wage bill for “key management personnel” that exceeds £7m – money the former education authority could only dream of. Meanwhile, more than a third of the city’s schools remain under the local authority.

With school attendance tanking, young people’s wellbeing in the doldrums and a special education needs system in crisis, public money that should be going into the classroom is instead going on duplicated roles and high individual salaries. This, and the lack of any meaningful local accountability, is the real scandal that needs addressing if we are to resolve the financial perils of an education sector that is no longer fit for purpose.

It was March 2022: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/165055/tens-of-millions-of-public-money-used-to-prop-up-poorly-managed-academy-schools-with-potentially-excessive-levels-of-pay/

This doesn't show that academisation is bad in principle, just that there are bad MATs and bad processes that need to improve.

If you look back in history you will find reports about poorly managed LAs too. At least the DfE has the power to replace bad MATs.

But that’s if you look at official exclusion rate, if you make a parents life so difficult that they withdraw their child then thst isn’t in the statistics as it’s the parents “choice”, even better if you can put off a parent from ever sending their child to your school in the first place then they will never show up in the statistics.

Because not every child is the same in the way trains would be.

generally your worst performing children (Sen and other issues) will take the most resources. If you can get rid of those children the your free resources whilst still maintaining/ improving results. Schools are now very much one size fits all and if you don’t fit you don’t belong

@aprilwotson
Staff turnover at MATs is much higher than in LEA schools. The number of teachers leaving the profession is much higher at MATs too. Therefore MATs are bad for society as we need teachers to stay in the profession as there is a recruitment crisis.
Additionally, even a reasonably good MAT is bad for the taxpayer because they cost more and don't deliver more than an LEA school. This makes them bad value for the public.
I don't think all academies can be moved back to LEAs overnight but the government can choose to allow LEAs to start taking over schools with funding to do this in the same way, that MATs get extra funding when they take on a school.
@JeremiahBullfrog I agree that far more checks need to be in place on how MATs spend their money. Far too much money is being spent on CEOs and executive heads to the detriment of our children. It is morally corrupt.

So are you part of some sort of left-wing campaign to bring academies back under LA control on principle, even where they are well run and successful? Or are you just concerned about the badly run academies? And perhaps just the ones where there isn't a good alternative MAT willing to take them on?

Most parents don't mind who runs their schools so long as they are run well.

@aprilwotson
I am hardly left-wing-far from it.
I just believe in choosing a model that is good value for the taxpayer and provides the best educational outcomes.
Research shows a consistent local approach is better-please read the UCL report.
I also know that MATs are taking money away from frontline teaching and I think it is wrong.
I believe taxpayers' money should be spent where it is intended-on actual teachers and educational resources. I think the LEA model is better because it costs less, provides the same educational outcomes and gives a consistent local approach to education.

Ironically, the ex-headteachers who started my MAT designed it to mimic what they saw as the best of the local authority models of the past. From their experience they knew that some LAs were good, and others not so good, and could see that competing demands for funds, political influences, and indifferent leadership were undermining LA educational provision.

Like anything, if only everyone could agree on the perfect model and work together to implement it, the world would be a better place. Instead, we have pockets of good and bad. All the secondaries in my area are well run academies, under different trusts, but they still all work together and work with the LA, who is supportive of the academy model. The MATs buy services from the LA. It works ok.

I think the LEA model is better because it costs less, provides the same educational outcomes and gives a consistent local approach to education.

I think it is very difficult to claim this is true today. It is so long since full LA control was the case - so since there were no stand-alone academy converters or MATs - that it really was a totally different educational landscape, both in terms of the funding available and the level of need within the students coming through.

Is there an example of a ‘fully non-academised’ county today that can be compared to a county of similar demographics with stand-alone academies and MATs, where a valid comparison can be made?

It is a valid concern. Are their high salaries from government funded money or from external funding that trust heads pull in? Perhaps a smaller base salary plus an agreed bonus type, for example taking a percentage of raised fund, will be fairer.

@Nobots that's the problem, they take a slice out of every school's budget. The schools though, can't replace obsolete IT equipment, buy essential supplies or hire TAs. Then they spaff it away on expensive IT equipment so they can work from home and all expenses paid 'research' jaunts.

The LA also used to take a fixed slice out of every school’s budget.

One of the reasons academy conversion was popular with Outstanding / very good schools initially was that this slice came under their control instead. As they had been net donors into the LA system (whereas lower performing schools with more high needs pupils were net takers, overall), they actually had more money to spend on things that benefitted their own students.

This would be a barrier to their return to LA control, as well - why should they return to paying the LA for services that they only receive a small share of, so that other schools get what they need?

16.1% of pupils in academies have an EHCP or other SEN support. This compares with 17.3% of pupils on community schools, 15.9% in VA schools and 17.0% in VC schools. That works out at about 0.8 of a pupil per year for each academy. Hardly evidence of widespread behaviour of the kind you allege.

As a parent if DC in a private school I have long been staggered about how the public has swallowed the lie that private schools are ‘subsided’ or have ‘tax breaks’ at the detriment of state schools
Yet academies are able to literally syphon public money off as profit making businesses, affecting thousands and thousands of children.
Its one of the greatest lies ever told.

No, academies cannot syphon money off as profit making businesses. They are charities by law, not profit making businesses.

Ok happily stand corrected on that

but I still don’t understand the management salaries, use of private companies for extra resourcing etc etc and how that can be justified as a charitable organisation

@cantkeepawayforever
The problem is that standalone academies do not have the economies of scale that an LEA that ran 100 schools would have had. That is why many standalone academies ended up joining multi-academy trusts. The problem now is that MATs are taking a much bigger slice than an LEA would have done for CEO and executive head salaries. Less money is being spent on frontline services. The EPI report shows this. As many MATs have schools all over the country, there is also a lack of a consistent local approach to dealing with SEN etc.
Like LEAs did, MATs also take money from some of their schools to spend in other schools but not ones even in the same locality. So again local areas are less able to meet the needs of all children in area e.g SEN because there is less joined up thinking. See the UCL report.

Lived experience!! Facts and figures can say what they want but I live in a local authority that has a high level of academies, I have an autistic child and know a lot of parents of autistic children and see what they go through as regards education. They hay said I don’t think local authority schools are necessarily any better than academies now as regards inclusivity but it’s the whole drive towards academies, league tables etc that has got us where we are.

I think that you also need to account for the ‘missing’ children - how many SEN children are being forced into unwanted home schooling due to the lack of any suitable placement.

This is not an academy issue per se (not that there are options in many areas - my entire large county has 1 non-academy secondary), but in looking at the situation for SEN children you have to include all those not currently in school as well as all those in each type of school (plus how many would prefer a specialist placement they have been denied) to see the situation from a family’s point of view.

I would agree that all schools are bad with SEN children. SEN children are far more likely to be illegally excluded or permanently excluded than non-SEN children in all types of school. The only reason I object to people trying to pin this on academies is that community schools are no better. It is appalling that it has been like this for years and no-one has made any real attempt to address it.

The whole academy thing is a scam invented by Blair , put on steroids by the tories and once again fleecing the public.

my son was at an la run school one of the few left in our la and it was horrendous for Sen. He’s now at a special school which is an academy and it’s great so it’s def not a case of La school good academy bad. just think the whole movement towards academies is what has made it worse overall. I know kids with far higher needs than my son who went to mainstream school in the 90s and got on great. Same school 15 years later try’s to put parents of Sen kids off before they even apply for the school

So are you part of some sort of left-wing campaign to bring academies back under LA control on principle, even where they are well run and successful?

But it works the other way too. Successful and thriving LA schools have been sucked into MATs on a principle, not because it was the right thing. They are victims of a right-wing campaign.

LEAs have been starved of funds while money has been pumped into the MAT concept. There are whole law firms who have been set up to deal with the legal processes for creating academies and their fees are paid by the government - money that should have gone into the education of pupils.

The original idea was that academies would be set up as centres of excellence and they would support less well performing schools to do better. It has all been turned on its head now. Heads of MATs cherry pick schools to join their fold on the basis of their performance and eschew the schools in trouble - they do not want to sully their performance stats.

Another big problem is that LEA schools that are performing well cannot get clear information about future policy. If they do not join a MAT, might they find themselves forced to do so under the next government edict, and should they be looking around to find a MAT that at least fits their ethos on the basis that they do not want to find themselves allocated to one with no say?

It is very unsettling and undermining for them. I, as COG, had several conversations with the DforE to try and get some steer on this to help us plan for the future, but no-one had the vaguest clue. And they admitted this. This is no way to run an education system.

And all so totally unnecessary ........

You are being over-dramatic. Schools leadership teams make pragmatic decisions based on what is best for their schools at the time. My area is not entrenched as right-wing or left-wing. It does academisation well because most people have accepted the zeitgeist and made the best of it. Crucially, that includes the local authority, which has supported schools to either remain autonomous as single academy trusts or join together as MATs, or choose MATs with appropriate checks and balances. When one school had an underperforming MAT the LA were appropriately vocal and instrumental in getting the MAT replaced by a much better MAT.

To suggest that the whole academy system should be reversed to match your inaccurate rose-tinted view of the past is just naive and silly. The labour government will introduce some tweaks to legislation, but I very much doubt there will be a left-wing revolution in this parliament.

They are victims of a right-wing campaign

A campaign supported by all major parties because of extensive evidence from around the world that giving schools the freedoms associated with academy status drives up standards. Indeed, the evidence is not just that academies perform better. The evidence from other countries is that other types of school also perform better in areas where there are academies. The real scandal is that the current SoS for Education wants to ignore the evidence and remove one of the most important freedoms by forcing academies to follow the national curriculum.

This "right-wing campaign" has seen England going up the PISA league table for school performance after years of decline. Scotland, which does not have academies, is going in the other direction.